philosophy
Théorie Communiste responds
The last instalment of the Théorie Communiste-Aufheben debate.
In Aufheben #11 we published a critique of our articles on ‘decadence’ (from Aufheben issues 2-4) by the French group Théorie Communiste (TC). In the following issue we published our reply to TC’s critique. Since then we have had a number exchanges with TC in which they responded to our reply.
Hegel - Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity - Slavoj Žižek
Žižek gets theological.
According to a commonplace, Judaism (and Islam) is a "pure" monotheism, while Christianity, with its Trinity, is a compromise with polytheism; Hegel even designates Islam as THE "religion of sublimity" at its purest, as the universalization of the Jewish monotheism:
Knowledge, morality and hope: The social thought of Noam Chomsky - Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers
Cohen and Rogers analyse the various facets of Noam Chomsky's political philosophy.
Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky
The parallax view: Karatani’s 'Transcritique. On Kant and Marx' - Slavoj Žižek
The philosophical basis for social action, as recast in Kojin Karatani’s striking Transcritique. On Kant and Marx. Slavoj Žižek investigates the irreducible antinomies of production and circulation — or economics and politics — as envisioned from the gap in between.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: THE PARALLAX VIEW
Against human rights - Slavoj Žižek
Alibi for militarist interventions, sacralization for the tyranny of the market, ideological foundation for the fundamentalism of the politically correct: can the ‘symbolic fiction’ of universal rights be recuperated for the progressive politicization of actual socio-economic relations?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS
Biopolitics: Between Terri Schiavo and Guantanamo - Slavoj Žižek
Žižek draws on Giorgio Agamben's notion of Homo sacer - someone who is biologically alive but deproved of all rights - in order to understand the rationales and causes of the 'war on terror'.
Welcome to the desert of the Real - Slavoj Žižek
The philosopher-psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek’s take on the aftermath of the September 11<sup>th</sup> attacks, including his trademark references to popular culture to explain his Lacanian psychoanalysis. He presents a choice: “there are two fundamental ways to react to such traumatic events which cause unbearable anxiety: the way of superego and the way of the act”, and it is in ‘the act’ in which he sees the possibility to escape “the reassertion of the barbaric violence” (note: this is not the longer book of the same name).
[i]America's "holiday from history" was a fake: America's peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere.
Anarchism and the politics of ressentiment - Saul Newman
[b]This essay critiques classical anarchism using Nietzsche’s concept of ‘ressentiment’ and Michel Foucault’s ideas on power.
Panopticism - Michel Foucault
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” This is chapter 3 of Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish, which details the growth of surveillance and disciplinary power alongside the utilitarian logic of early capitalism.
From Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan © 1977
The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.
Creating a new public sphere, without the state - Paolo Virno
[b]This interview illustrates the move amongst the post-Leninist Italian radical left towards an anarchist view of the state, as well as Virno’s insistence that the concept of ‘multitude’ does not replace the concept of ‘working class’ and his controversial assertion that fear and insecurity – which he calls ‘precarity’ – define the globalised world.
